Should ECOWAS reprimand Gambia?

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade, center, flanked by Burkina Faso President Blaise Compaore, left, and Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, arrives Friday 24 December in Abuja, Nigeria, for an emergency summit on the political crisis in Ivory Coast.

Interference, Sovereignty, etc., etc, have become monotonously bizarre clichés we hear only when our governments face criticism from outsiders for shameless violations of laws they swear to uphold.

A point in case is the ongoing Ivorian crisis. A familiar voice in this ‘anti-neocolonialist’ crusade is that of Gambia’s President Yahya Jammeh, who recently went out of his way to attack the whole world for simply telling a defeated presidential candidate, Laurent Gbagbo, to step down and cede power to the rightful winner, President Alassan Ouattara of Ivory Coast. Jammeh’s attitude towards ECOWAS for its stance in the crisis also shed light on his disregard for authority and unity.
Someone suggested that Gambia should be kicked out of ECOWAS for its president’s performance in his latest vain attempt to draw unnecessary attention to himself. But ECOWAS is expected to know better than giving significance to frivolous complaints, which is exactly what it will be doing if it responds to the rumblings of an entity that barely has anything to offer to the sub regional bloc.
Does Gambia have anything to offer in the Ivory Coast today, anyway?
An impartial analysis of President Yahya Jammeh’s own statement could possibly help out in answering this question. Understandably, his opposition to the international community’s approach to the Ivorian crisis is purely based on his disagreement to the use of force, which he argues goes against “the spirit of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states as enshrined in the ECOWAS Charter…”

You don’t need to remind someone like Yahya Jammeh, whose government came to power with the use of force and has managed to survive all these years amid accusations and incontrovertible evidences of abuse of authority, that no one prefers force to peaceful means of settling disputes. However, Jammeh’s description of Guinea’s former military junta as “the former criminal government” raises so much perplexity that it shouldn’t go untreated.
The question that immediately comes up is: was it the act of “slaughtering many people including innocent women and children…” that qualified the Dadis Camara regime as “criminal” or the fact that it assumed power by force? Again unfortunately we will never get an answer to this. But in either case, Yahya Jammeh is guilty as much as Dadis Camara. Both of them ousted democratically elected regimes to assume power. Dozens of Guinean civilians were indeed subsequently murdered by men believed to be members of Dadis Camara’s security forces, and yes, ECOWAS’s failure to intervene after that “horrible crime” deserves condemnation. But are the victims of the so-called September 28 Massacre in Conakry any different from those of April 10 and 11 children massacre in Gambia?
Dadis was erroneously acting to safeguard his illegal authority just as Laurent Gbagbo is currently causing mayhem to safeguard his in the face of worldwide condemnation. The Gambian children murdered in 2000, on the other hand, were only demonstrating in demand for answers to the situation surrounding the murders of their colleagues.
ECOWAS may have malfunctioned in the past, but this is certainly a new ECOWAS, the one that says no to forceful takeover of governments, which is exactly what Gbagbo is doing. This is the ECOWAS that also stresses the need for respect of democratic principles, which includes justice for victims of Gambian children murdered in 2000 as well as accepting defeat in elections.
Mr Gbagbo is using force to contain the Ivorian people’s legitimate resistance against his attempt to remain in power after losing elections, and yet Yahya Jammeh doesn’t see the resulting mass graves, kidnapping and disappearances Gbagbo’s men are committing in an effort to imposing his wish...

Expression of fear takes diverse forms. Some of the times we tend to blindly condemn even the most obvious of realities when we are so awestruck of their repercussion on us and what we stand for. This is exactly the situation President Yahya Jammeh finds himself in as regard the ongoing political standoff in the Ivory Coast. But his approach is way too demeaning to say the least.
For those of us who believe in Jammeh as telling the truth against the “imperialist West”, are we to give a blind eye to his own crimes and merely accept his criticism of others on the basis of hate and racist feelings?
It takes more than the love of the truth to side with a regime like the one Laurent Gbagbo today heads. Jammeh must have tangible reason to take the dangerous path he has chosen, opposing the rest of the world in favor of a lost course. There is absolutely no way Gbagbo can win this – it is just too late, which means Gambia will eventually be at odds with the inevitable Outtara government, thanks to the misguided decision of an amateurish leadership.